The road from Drohobych to Boryslav.

By Stanley Bill

The picture is eloquent. A long road stretches out into an elevated distance. The relicts of Soviet industry rot in the foreground. The asphalt is pockmarked with craters – more pothole than road. The view slopes sharply away, while the hills in the background form little more than a distant promise of a destination, as the road seems to lose itself in a thicket of leafless trees before it can reach them. The sky is gray and ominous, though lighter shades illuminate the wooded line of the horizon. A single white passenger vehicle picks its way among the potholes, while an old Russian truck lumbers up the hill to greet it.

I took this photograph on the main artery between Drohobych and Boryslav – two medium-sized towns on the cusp of the Carpathian Mountains in the west of Ukraine. The battered surface of the road goes a long way to explaining why hundreds of thousands of protesters – many of them from the western regions – have filled the streets and squares of Kyiv in recent months to demand transformation.

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